March 17, 2015

“Clickspittle: an unquestioningly loyal follower who obediently shares every trivial thought of their idol on social media.” Post-modern portmanteaus from The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, excerpted in The Independent. (Via @Catchword)

*

“Most important, it stood for Internet. But it also stood for other valuable i things, like individual, imagination, i as in me, etc. It also did a pretty good job of laying a solid foundation for future product naming.” A knowledgeable Quora answer to the question “What is the history of the i prefix in Apple product names?”(Via @AlanBrew)

“Around the time of the birth of OK, there was a fad for komical Ks instead of Cs on the pages of newspapers … including from 1839: ‘The gentleman to the left of the speaker, in klaret kolored koat with krimson kollar, is Mr. Klay, member of Kongress from Kentucky’.”Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, marks the 176th anniversary of “OK” with a post about the word’s “konspicuous, kurious, komical” … uh, kwalities. (Read my 2010 post about “OK.”)

*

What do we lose when dictionaries delete words like bluebell, catkin, lark, and mistletoe to make room for blog, broadband, MP3 player, and chatroom? British nature writer Robert Macfarlane—most recently the author of Landmarks—writes in The Guardian about “the importance of preserving and plenishing a diverse language for landscape.” His essay includes some beautiful, obscure words like ammil, “a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs, and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter.” Plenishing is pretty wonderful, too. (Via @StanCarey)

September 04, 2013

It was K’s turn in the rotation, and Google—which since 2009 has given every Android release the code name* of a generic confection, in alphabetical order—had announced that Android 4.4 would be called “Key Lime Pie.” (The previous release was Jelly Bean.) But yesterday the company pulled a switcheroo, revealing that the next release would for the first time bear the name of a branded treat, the Kit Kat bar. For reasons known only to the Don’t Be Evil Empire, Google is spelling it “KitKat.”

Stranger still, no money is changing hands between Google and Nestlé, which acquired the Kit Kit brand in 1988 through its purchase of Rowntree, the British company that introduced “Kit Cat” boxed chocolates in the 1920s. (The spelling was changed to “Kit Kat” in 1937.) In the United States, the Hershey Company has had a license to manufacture Kit Kat bars since 1970.

John Lagerling, Google’s director of global partnerships, told the BBC that the decision to switch from “Key Lime Pie” to “KitKat” was made in late 2012:

“We realised that very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie,” he explained.

“One of the snacks that we keep in our kitchen for late-night coding are KitKats. And someone said: ‘Hey, why don't we call the release KitKat?’

“We didn’t even know which company controlled the name, and we thought that [the choice] would be difficult. But then we thought well why not, and we decided to reach out to the Nestle folks.”

Nestle has already kicked off a bizarre cross-promotion strategy that will bestow Nexus 7s and Google Play credits on those who find specially branded Kit Kat candy bars emblazoned with the Android logo, à la Willy Wonka. Yes, this is really happening. Apparently the agreement was finalized behind closed doors at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and all parties involved amazingly managed to keep the name under wraps (I slay me) for six months despite the fact that Nestle has been churning out that Android-laden packaging for 50 million candy bars.

The promotion, which begins September 6, will run in the U.S. and the U.K. In anticipation, the Android website depicts a Kit Kat bar and a chocolate robot. The Kit Kat website is a playful spoof of technology layout and lingo:

“Kit Kat 4.4: The future of confectionery has arrived.”

I especially like the copy on the “Design” page: “Diamond-sharp bevels machined to salivatingly tight tolerances help transform the chocolate bar with the long history into the chocolate bar of the future.”

A few things you may not know about Kit Kat, gleaned mostly from Wikipedia:

“Kit Kat” or “Kit Cat” was originally a type of mutton pie served in London’s political/literary Kit-Cat Club in the 18th century.

In the theatrical and film versions of Cabaret, the Kander-Ebb musical set in Weimar Berlin, the Kit Kat Klub is a fictional nightclub where the character Sally Bowles performs.

The company slogan “Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat” was created in 1958 and is still in use.

The Kit Kat bar known as Big Kat in the U.S. is called Kit Kat Chunky in the rest of the world.

“In Japan, Nestlé has introduced over 200 different flavours since 2000, including ginger ale, soy sauce, creme brulee, green tea, and banana. The flavours are designed to appeal to younger buyers, and are often bought as good-luck gifts as the brand name echoes the Japanese phrase ‘Kitto Katsu’, roughly translating as ‘surely win’.”

A Kit Kat error page apologizes: “Darn. You’ve stumbled across the only kind of break we don’t like.”

December 05, 2012

The names are more similar than they appear. That’s because – surprise! – Kngine is meant to be pronounced “kin-gin.” Yes, “kin-gin,” despite the fact that (1) Kngine is meant to be a compression of “knowledge engine” and (2) in English, K before N is always, always, always silent.*

But language appears not to be the strong suit of the Kngine team—which is odd, since Kngine is billed as a natural-language app.

“Links are not answer”?

Copy is not answer, either. This line appears in large type and unpunctuated:

With its simple interface and brilliant engine your life will be smarter

My life has a rather complicated interface, actually. But I digress.

So what we have are two more names that begin with kin, just like—here comes the nostalgia—Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader), KIN (Microsoft’s ill-starred mobile phone), and Kinect (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 peripheral).

Some of you may also remember Kinetic, a fitness game made by Nike for the Sony EyeToy.

December 18, 2007

Google was in the news last week (is there ever a week when Google is not in the news?) after the company's blog announced the quiet launch of a new, Wikipedia-like project called Knol. Unlike Wikipedia, whose contributors are anonymous (and their authority unknown to readers), Knol will "highlight authors," according to Google's vice president of engineering, Udi Manber:

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

In his blog post, Manber defines knol as "a unit of knowledge." He consistently spells the word with a lower-case k, and writes that "we use the word 'knol' as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably." Outside Google, however, commenters have capitalized the name.

So--spelling: variable. What about pronunciation?

Motley Fool punned about "grassy knol" (that's a JFK-assassination reference, in case you didn't recognize it) and proposed the term "Knol troll" "for the money-chasing types who will plague the site if Google winds up encouraging mutinous behavior." Both usages suggest a long-vowel pronunication, as does the example of two other English words that end in -ol: extol and control.

But if knol is short for knowledge, it would logically require a short vowel sound. And there are several examples in English of words that end in -ol in which the o is short: protocol, parasol, alcohol. Note that all of them are three syllables long, with the stress on the first syllable. The one-syllable knol--pronounced to rhyme more or less with doll--follows a less familiar model. (Doubling the l might or might not help: -oll can be pronounced with either vowel sound.)

That's one pronunciation challenge. The other is the initial k, which is presumably silent. I've considered the problem of the initial silent k in my earlier analysis of Knuru (coined from knowledge + guru). Yes, many familiar words have a silent k--knife, knight, knee, knit--but when we encounter a coined kn- word we hesitate slightly. Could it be pronounced ka-nawl? Or ka-nole?

(I noticed another silent-k coined name last year, social-networking site that called itself Knover, coined from knowledge + rover. Again, the pronunciation was not quite intuitive. In any event, Knover seems to have come and gone within about 12 months: enter knover.com and you're redirected to something called FreshNotes.)

Google's new Knol is confusing legally, too. There's the much-better-known Knoll, the global, 70-year-old office-furniture manufacturer whose name rhymes with roll. And there's Knology (ticker symbol: KNOL), a 13-year-old cable company that serves the southeastern United States.

Finally, I'm not convinced that "Knol" clearly communicates "knowledge." There's that missing w, for starters. Without it, the word can look like knot or knoll to the casual reader.

That's a lotof encumbrances for one very short name.

Google could have made it work, to borrow a Project Runway catchphrase. Spelling the word Knole would have clarified that the vowel is meant to be long; spelling it Gnol would have retained the G-for-Google branding element while keeping the sense of to know (as in agnostic--admittedly a more arcane connection). Knowl is another option.

Or Google could have adhered to its established naming conventions (Gmail, Google Maps, etc.) and gone with a more straightforward name such as Gpedia, GoogleWise, Google Knowledge, or Googlepedia. Too boring? How about Gooru? Or TheKnow? Or even Ken, a wonderful old English word that means "perception" or "understanding" and is easy to anthropomorphize?

In the 1950s, some surge of naming testosterone produced a lot of swaggering male names ending in the letter K: Jack, Mark and Frank, not to mention Rock, Dirk and Buck. But over the past few decades, K has moved to the front of names: Kyle, Kaitlyn and Kayla. “If any letter defines modern American name style, K is it,” Wattenberg notes.

The most astonishing change concerns the ending of boys’ names. In 1880, most boys’ names ended in the letters E, N, D and S. In 1956, the chart of final letters looked pretty much the same, with more names ending in Y. Today’s chart looks nothing like the charts of the past century. In 2006, a huge (and I mean huge) percentage of boys’ names ended in the letter N. Or as Wattenberg put it, “Ladies and gentlemen, that is a baby-naming revolution.”

Brooks adds:

Naming fashion doesn’t just move a little. It swings back and forth. People who haven’t spent a nanosecond thinking about the letter K get swept up in a social contagion and suddenly they’ve got a Keisha and a Kody. They may think they’re making an individual statement, but in fact their choices are shaped by the networks around them.

(Access to the column is restricted to Times Select subscribers; if you want to read the rest, send me an email.)Update: All Times content is now free for everyone.

There are parallel trends in corporate and product naming, where, as with baby names, the rate of trend turnover is accelerating. Lately, many of my clients have requested names with "K" sounds. None of them can explain their preference; maybe they all have children named Kasey and Kyra. Or maybe want the impact of the plosive K sound to symbolize the forcefulness of their enterprises.

It wasn't always that way with K. According to a Wikipedia entry on inherently funny words, "In Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys, a character says, "Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny." And in a 1936 New Yorker article, H. L. Mencken made a similar argument for K words: "K, for some occult reason, has always appealed to the oafish risibles of the American plain people, and its presence in the names of many ... places has helped to make them joke towns ... for example, Kankakee, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohokus, Yonkers, Squeedunk, 'Stinktown' and Brooklyn."

And let's not forget Mel Blanc's recitation, on the old Jack Benny TV show, "Train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuuuu-ca-mon-gaaa!" which always got a huge laugh. A well-timed pause between the first two syllables emphasized the K sounds and somehow made them even funnier.

April 02, 2007

I learned about this month's New Name through Knowledge @ Wharton, a monthly e-newsletter from the University of Pennsylvania's business school.

What it is: Knuru is a new natural-language search engine for business information; Knowledge @ Wharton is its first major partner. "Natural language" simply means that instead of typing keywords into the search field, you type sentences: "What's happening with subprime mortgages?" or "Is Alan Greenspan still alive?" The service is free; results are presented in contextualized summaries from reputable business sources. From knuru.com's About page: "Unlike traditional search engines, knuru [sic] is not concerned with endless indexing of web pages and a never-ending convoluting of page rankings, paid rankings or any other artificial juxtapositioning [sic]of search results based on who pays most. Nor will we serve misleading paid-for search result rankings, which is common with other search technologies."

Where it comes from: Knuru's parent company is London-based Xexco, which founder Dennis Oudejans told me is pronounced "Exco." He added that he acquired "Xexco" when he acquired the company, and he's changing it to Knuru, and we're all thankful for that. (I believe Xexco is Klingon for "What were they thinking?")

What they're saying: Not much--yet. Knuru is still in beta. Microsoft Office users can access it (via a downloadable application) via the Research button; according to 44 voters in a Microsoft Office forum, Knuru earned five out of a possible five stars.

What it means: Dennis Oudejans told me in an email that the company had invited "five or six" naming agencies to bid on the naming project and eventually involved two--an unusual but not unprecedented decision. "One agency had an analytical/scientific approach, whereas the other seemed more unstructured and creative," Oudejans said. The analytical/scientific agency helped the company define its core values: agility, authority, and accuracy. Then the company tossed out all the names developed by the two agencies in favor of its own coinage, a blend of knowledge and guru. "Knuru" has meaning in at least one South Indian language, Tamil, although I was unable to discern from context what that meaning is. Pavala Knuru means "Coral Hill," a landmark nearArunachaleshwar Temple in Tiruvannamalai District, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I also discovered a saying in the Tetun language of East Timor: “bikan ho knuru mak baku malu” (as fork and spoon that always touch each other).

What I like: Knuru is short and unusual, and the partnership with Knowledge @ Wharton helps reinforce the "kn = knowledge" connection. The company was smart to register the name with at least three domain extensions domain: .com, .net, and .org. (Many startups fail to take this inexpensive precautionary step and leave themselves open to domain encroachment.)

What I'd worry about: Right off the bat I stumbled over Knuru's pronunciation. English has many words with silent k--know, knife, knock, knuckle. But the dropped k isn't intuitive, because at one time in the language's history (at least until the fourteenth century), the k was sounded in all those words, as it is in the German from which they came. English has also adopted a number of Yiddish words--knish, knaidlach, k'nocker--in which, as in German, the k is hard. (K'nocker is unrelated to the British slang term knackered, in which the k is silent.) And then there's Knut (German) or Knute (Scandinavian), names pronounced with a hard k that are just familiar enough to English speakers to invite confusion. (The English form makes the pronunciation explicit: Canute, which means "white haired.")

All of which explains why I want to pronounce knuru like k'nuru. I'd have no such problem with a silent-g coinage: even though the gn- and kn- stems are equivalent--they both mean "know"--I'm not tempted to pronounce the g. Knuru confuses because it looks too foreign to send the message "follow the common English-pronunciation rules."

Here's a separate problem: I'm not convinced that beginning this name with a silent letter tells the right story for this company, which should be positioning itself as an outspoken--not reticent--knowledge source.

But the biggest problem with Knuru is that, despite its odd look, it's a descriptive rather than a metaphorical name: it tells "who we are" (a knowledge guru) rather than "how your life will be better." Compare, for example, the name of another new natural-language search engine, Powerset--a term borrowed from the language of mathematics and invigorated by an expanded new context (and a great logo). No ambiguous pronunciation or forced word-blend; just the promise of power and being set to do what you want. Very effective. (Thanks to Laurie Clemans for the Powerset update.)

The decision: On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "eh" and 5 being "yesss!", I'd give Knuru 3.1. This is a naming decision guided too much by strict etymology (remember: etymology doesn't matter; associations do), domain availability, and programmers' rules ("knowledge plus guru equals knuru") and not enough by common sense ("Will everyone be able to pronounce this word and figure out what it means?") and metaphor. Unfortunately, it's the sort of solution that emerges all too frequently when companies--especially technology companies--name themselves.

But: Knuru may be able to overcome the liabilities of its name with a strong branding message ("We're the knowledge gurus") and some pronunciation guides ("Knuru ... as in know-how"). As they themselves proclaim to their users, context is everything.